Technical Info
Making a Web Site Browser Friendly
In order to have the broadest possible readership, many things were considered when designing this site. I established the following goals and technical criteria used to meet those goals. You might want to keep these in mind when designing your own site. Note that this site goes a bit overboard in its restrictions due to the nature of the business of the site. Many of the clients or prospective clients may not presently be using the state-of-the art computer systems and browsing software, and I do not want to alienate them.
The goals are- Be informative
- Be easy to navigate
- Download quickly
- Render in a browser quickly
- Be readable in almost every browser (on any computer/device)
- Display well on any computer monitor (any resolution or color capability)
- Pages print out easily
- Be appealing
- Avoid things that commonly annoy people when web browsing
To accomplish these goals, the following criteria were used
- HTML elements
- Adhere to W3C transitional HTML 4.0 but remain HTML 3.2 compatible whenever possible (all pages are W3C validated)
- No frames (See Jakob Nielsen's frank article)
- No Java/JavaScript or other browser language extensions required to access the site
- No plug-in extension requirements for multimedia content
- Always use end tags
- Do not make links open new window without informing the user
- No cookies
- No automatic pop-up windows
- Make web pages accessible to all people regardless of disability in the spirit of the Web Accessibility Initiative
- No audio tracks that automatically play
- Graphic elements
- Slim graphics for speedier downloading
- No PNGs (Superior to GIFs, but not all browsers support these images)
- No animated GIFs
- Recycle graphics between pages to avoid frequent image downloading
- Specify size of graphics in HTML to speed page rendering
- Graphics contain alternate text (ALT tag) so the page is fully usable even when graphics are not loaded.
- No background images unless absolutely necessary
To satisfy the above criteria, the HTML for the web pages was all hand coded, but to automate some of the production process, I used a combination of a text editor (usually emacs) and an HTML pre-processor (SHYPREC) I wrote in Perl.